We are using Gitlab for our repository management. I wanted to have Smallworld Magik syntax highlighting in Gitlab. Given that Gitlab is open source, it isn’t that hard to build it ourselves and get it into Gitlab, right?

During some researching on how Gitlab does its syntax highlighting I came to their Syntax Highlighting documentation page. They are using the Rouge rubygem, for which the source code is found on Github. After reading the README and CHANGELOG of this repository, it seemed that it is still alive and being actively developed.

So I started creating a lexer for the Magik programming language. The README gives clear instructions on how to create your own lexer. Also, there are many lexers for other languages which are usable examples. I quickly developed a lexer and created a pull request for the Smallworld Magik language. Then I waited… And nothing happened.

It turns out there are many pull requests for languages waiting to be merged. However, there appears is no action. My next action will be doing some prodding of people who are recently involved. Hopefully this will get merged some day and others can benefit from this too. Of course, I do understand that these people probably spend their free time on this and that I cannot expect instant service. Just like that I cannot provide any guarantees for any of my open source projects. A (friendly) message stating it can take a while would help though!

In conclusion, it might be worthwhile to do a bit more research on how things work and the (complete) path to getting something merged into a product.